This is a search plugin with which you can build a customised search form. It allows you to search custom fields, choose multiple search parameters and choose HTML form elements to represent them.

I originally developed this plugin for a client project. Basically the problem they had was that they were storing structured data (real estate properties) but the default wordpress search didn’t allow them to search it in a structured way (by price and location). The plugin I’ve built allows you to configure multiple search input fields, configure the behaviour of each field (eg what options appear in a dropdown) and configure what database fields each input corresponds to (eg post title, post content, a custom field called price).

The plugin is now at point where I think it could be useful to other people although I’m aware that there are a lot of improvements that could be made. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or complaints and I will do my best to get them resolved.

Setting up the fields

Each field has a number of settings which control the way the input appears to the user and the way the search is performed.

Label sets the label displayed next to the field, you can set this to whatever you want.

Data Type controls what type of data is being searched (i.e. what database table is being used). The standard options are “Post Field” for data such as post title and post content, from the standard wordpress post data, “Custom Field” for data from the custom fields, and “Category” to search on the categories a post is in.

Data Field makes a more specific selection from the data available. The drop down list should give some sensible options, or if you know the name of the database field you want to query you can type this in manually.

Widget controls what type of HTML input is created for the front end of the site. It should be fairly obvious what these do. The inputs called “Auto Values” will automatically create options based on what is in the database.

Some widgets will require extra options in the Widget Options field. At the moment this is just the drop down and radio button widgets (not the auto values ones) which require you to specify a list of values for the user to choose from. You can specify this as a comma separated list of values, ‘a,b,c’ for three options with values ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ respectively, or if you want to give ‘friendly’ labels to the user you can separate the value from the label using a colon as follows ‘a:Group A,b:Group B,c:Group C’.

The Compare field controls the way that the user input is compared to the data in the database. I would expect the most commonly used of these to be “equals” which requires an exact match between the user data and the database field (useful for category searches) and the “Words in” or “Phrase In” types which will search to see if the user input is a part of the data, rather than a full match, this is useful for things like searching the text of a post. The difference between ‘words’ and ‘phrase’ is that ‘words’ splits the input into a series of words and searches for these individually whereas ‘Phrase’ searches for all the words in sequence.

The “Less Than” and “More Than” comparisons ensure that the data is less than or more than the user input respectively. This is probably only relevant for numeric input but it can be used for strings as well and will search alphabetically. For numeric input it can help to also tick the “Numeric” checkbox as sometimes the database will be set up to compare numbers alphabetically (so that 10 is less than 2).

The “Range” comparison is a little more complicated and requires the user input to be of the form A-B to return results that are between A and B. This is primarily intended to be used for Drop-downs and radio buttons where the values can be set by the site administrator. If you specify the values for the dropdown like the following: “-10:Less Than 10,10-20:Between 10 and 20,20-:More than 20″, then the user will be presented with the options “Less Than 10″, “Betwen 10 and 20″ and “More than 20″ but the search will be done with the values “-10″,”10-20″ and “20-”. Again the numeric checkbox should be used for numeric data.

I hope that helps, please let me know if you have any trouble (or joy) with the plugin or if any of my instructions don’t make sense.

Further Development

For developers, I’ve tried to build this in a modular way to allow extensions to be added, I will try to document this at some point in the future but if you can’t wait then the best places to get started would be to look at the filter ‘custom_search_get_classes’ in custom-search/custom-search.php and the Great Real Estate bridging code in custom-search/bridges/greatrealestate.php.

Out of the box, it will not support non-standard tables as the db structure for each will be different so they will each require some custom coding.

I have though designed the plugin for extensibility to allow people to add in the code for non-standard tables. If you are familiar with php you could try to integrate the new tables yourself. I keep meaning to write documentation for the extensibility API but in brief you would need to:

* Look at the great-real-estate.php file in the bridges directory.
* Copy this file into a new file “my-other-wp-plugin.php” and change the class and function names as appropriate.
* Re-write the various functions of the Joiner class to represent the new table.
* Send a copy to me for inclusion in forthcoming releases.

If you are not familiar with PHP you could post a feature request in the bug-tracker and I may try to implement some of the most requested ones myself in future when I have time.

If the plugin is behaving correctly then when you select “Data Type” = “Custom Field” it should populate the “Data Field” dropdown with a list of all the different custom fields which have been applied to posts in your blog.

Are there custom fields currently applied to posts?

If there are then there must be some kind of incompatibility between the plugin and your blog setup. Do you see any javascript errors when you are managing the plugin? How did you add the custom fields?

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I have a small doubt regarding this plug in, can i use this plug in for database search(i am using csv to post plug in to create my posts) i want o create a search form to show data from csv files. How can i do this. If this feature is not included…do you have any thought to add this feature?

can i use this plugin for a result sheet database search? i mean if i make a database with 2 or 3 columns with title ID, roll no , result then how can i search the specific database? I could not express everything. please solve it.

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